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With T-Mobile myTouch 4G and T-Mobile's default Android 2.2, I can download the camera photos by pairing the phone with a computer through Bluetooth, and using an integrated file browser functionality of the computer (e.g. the Browse Device option on OS X).

But Google's Galaxy Nexus with Google's default Android 4.2 doesn't seem to support file browsing over Bluetooth.

How do I download the photos from the Nexus, without using any questionable third-party tools? (Don't you find it ironic that a vanilla Google Nexus device doesn't have this rather standard functionality — file browser over Bluetooth — that all the old phones do have?)

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Bluetooth is a rather slow choice when it comes to transferring bigger files: to transfer 10 MB, you'ld need...

  • BT 2.* (2.1 MBit/s) ~ 40s
  • BT 3.* (24 MBit/s) ~ 4s
  • WiFi g (54 MBit/s) ~ 2s

And with BT, the range is quite limited as well. Most devices probably still use BT 2 standard.

How to transfer your files then? You might want to check the most frequented questions of the "file-transfer" tag for that. The usual method (if you don't want any "questionable third-party tools" involved) is to connect your device to your PC using the USB cable -- which then should mount your device storage like a drive. You could also use some third-party tools (they are not all "questionable") to manage your device via WiFi -- AirDroid would be a good choice for that.

For transferring data between Android devices, you could use . Again, there are some good 3rd party tools to help, as e.g. SuperBeam or WiFiShare.

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  • I connected my Nexus to a Windows 7 laptop, and the drive that is presented doesn't have any files on it whatsoever. – cnst Apr 19 '13 at 17:23
  • If you never stored anything there, it might indeed be empty. Neither having Windows nor a Nexus, nor any more details (like e.g. how big the "drive" claims to be), I'm afraid I won't be of much further help... – Izzy♦ Apr 19 '13 at 18:19
  • Ok, I guesstimated that being low on space might be the reason why it shows empty when connected through USB. I've had to remove about 4 apps, each worth about 15MB, and now when I connect the Nexus, quite a lot of folders do finally show up. – cnst May 2 '13 at 3:54
  • That sounds strange -- but glad you figured out! I have no idea why it should hide some folders for being low on space. Even completely full, it should show everything. Not accepting new files makes sense (if low on space, where to store them otherwise?) -- but hiding content does not. – Izzy♦ May 2 '13 at 6:10
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I use both Google+ Instant Upload and DropBox Photo uploading features. You can indicate whether or not to upload on Wifi only if you prefer preventing surprise overages if you don't have an unlimited data plan.

This also provides a nice cloud backup/storage facility.

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  • Too slow. I need to offload 12GB of photos, doing it via the cloud is impossible, especially over WiFi, thanks to AT&T. – cnst Apr 19 '13 at 17:21
  • Perhaps you should just use a usb cable to do all the photos you currently have and set up a cloud sync going forward. – Zooks64 Apr 19 '13 at 22:44

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